Teaching European Citizenship across the curriculum
Corinne Buijten, a French teacher, shares with us an interesting method of teaching European citizenship in a cross-curricular manner.
At the time when France had some political issues with Muslim girls wearing their head scarves in the « école de la République », we ,teachers of the European section of our school, a history, geography and citizenship teacher –this is all one subject in France- and myself –English teacher, decided to have our students working on this topic.
The pupils were 14 or 15 years old, they had had five hours of English for two school years and that was their last project of their second year. We had already done many similar projects with an internet research and a final work based on their findings.
We have asked them to launch an internet research on “laïcité” and to find what are the French policy, position and habits not only at school but society in general .They had then to launch the same type of research for the United Kingdom and one more European country of their choice.
They had first to find three sources, adequate articles, for each country at least one on internet and one taken from a library book, the third one from the source of their choice. They had then to sum these articles up and keep the gist of the information given. The final purpose of this exercise was to express their point of view during an organized debate.
The first discovery they did was that the word “laïcité” so dear to the French does not exist in English. The separation between anything that is linked to the State and religion is not so relevant in other cultures. They soon realized that there were many different ways of dealing with things, that what was crucial in some cultures may be irrelevant in others.
The unexpected outcome of this exercise is that a lot of them developed a point of view similar to what the British do in their country, they had been capable to analyze several practices and make their own judgement which was not to always be on their national side.
